Tag: slavery

Maryland to consider slavery reparations after Gov. Wes Moore’s veto is overridden

Maryland will create a commission to study potential reparations for slavery after lawmakers voted Tuesday to override a veto by Gov. Wes Moore — currently the nation’s only Black governor — that disappointed many fellow Democrats.

Moore said in his veto letter in May that it was a difficult decision to veto the bill, which was a priority of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. But he wrote there has been enough study of the legacy of slavery, and it was now time to “focus on the work itself” to address it.

But Democrats who control both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly decided the commission was needed to better examine how to do that.

“This topic isn’t easy, but, again, without formal study, reparations risk being dismissed as symbolic or unconstitutional, regardless of moral merit,” said Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Democrat.

After his veto was overridden, Moore said that while he disagrees with the legislature’s decision, “I am eager to move forward in partnership on the work of repair that we all agree is an urgent and pressing need.”

“I believe the time for action is now — and we must continue moving forward with the work of repair immediately,” Moore said in a statement. “That mission is especially vital given the immediate and ongoing effects of this federal administration on our constituents, including communities that have been historically left behind.”

Potential reparations outlined in the bill include official statements of apology, monetary compensation, property tax rebates, social service assistance, as well as licensing and permit fee waivers and reimbursement. Reparations also could include assistance with making a down payment on a home, business incentives, childcare, debt forgiveness and tuition payment waivers for higher education.

Maryland’s Black population is about 30%, the highest percentage of any state outside of the Deep South.

Support for reparations gained momentum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. However, the issue has been a difficult one, particularly for high-profile Democrats, and comes amid a broader conservative backlash over how race, history and inequality are handled in public institutions.

“At a time of growing attacks on diversity and equity, today’s action reaffirms our shared commitment to truth-telling, accountability, and meaningful progress for Black Marylanders,” the state’s Legislative Black Caucus said in a statement.

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Congress quietly moves US closer to military draft

A provision in this year’s NDAA will require the Selective Service System (SSS) to find a way to make registering for the draft automatic instead of letting 18-year-old males sign up themselves, which is current practice.

The SSS would have a year to try to construct a list of all potential draftees in the U.S. by pooling information from other Federal databases. “Automatic” draft registration will start a year after the 2026 NDAA is signed into law, unless the Selective Service is repealed before then.

This doesn’t mean that a draft is being activated right away, or that those registered will be sent induction orders — although preparing to do so is the sole purpose of making this list. This will, however, be the largest change in Selective Service law since 1980, and will move the U.S. closer to activation of a draft than at any time in the last half century.

To be sure, “automatic” registration is a response to a growing recognition that the current system is an abject failure in the face of pervasive noncompliance.

Few young men register voluntarily with the SSS, and almost none of them report their new addresses to the SSS each time they move. As a result, the current database is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be “less than useless” for an actual draft, according to Bernard Rostker, who was Director of the Selective Service System from 1979-1981, testifying in 2019.The obvious congressional response would be to end the registration program and abolish the Selective Service System as a failure and unfit for its stated purpose, even if one supports a draft.

But neither Democrats nor Republicans seem willing to let go of their fantasies of a ready-to-go draftee list, which will allow them to plan for endless, unlimited wars without having to worry about whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them. Keeping conscription on a hair-trigger, like keeping nuclear weapons on a hair-trigger, allows these weapons to be used as part of the arsenal of U.S. military and diplomatic threats. Both have broad bipartisan support.

The idea of “automatic” draft registration originated within the SSS during the Biden Administration and was introduced in Congress in 2024 by a Democrat. But a database-driven process aligns perfectly with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its penchant for automated aggregation, matching, and use of data originally collected for unrelated purposes.

“Automatic” draft registration won’t make a draft any easier to administer or enforce. “Garbage-in, garbage-out” merging of lists compiled for other purposes will result in a list of potential draftees and their mailing addresses that’s just as incomplete and inaccurate as the current one.

The draft still isn’t a feasible option, and abolishing the SSS remains the only realistic course of action. The lesson of the last forty-five years of draft registration, and of the quiet but persistent noncompliance by generations of potential draftees, is that young Americans want to make their own choices of which wars, if any, they will fight. We should thank them for their service in countering military adventurism. We’ll need to keep reminding military planners that calling draft registration “automatic” won’t make young people submit to a draft without resistance.

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Germany Enacts U.S.-Style Registration for Military Conscription

On Friday, December 5, 2025, the German Bundestag gave its final approval to a law that, beginning in 2026, will require all German men to fill out a registration form for military service when they reach age 18. Responses to the questionnaire will be used to generate a list of potential draftees to be used if military conscription is activated.

On the day of the vote in the Bundestag there were anti-draft rallies and marches in Berlin (5,000 people), Hamburg, and other cities, and a School Strike Against the Draft that involved students in at least 90 cities and towns throughout Germany.

This revision to German military conscription law has been widely misunderstood, with many reports the scheme is voluntary (it isn’t, although the amount of the administrative fine for noncompliance has not yet been determined) or that it reflects a rejection of conscription. In fact, it’s intended by the German government to make a show of increased readiness to quickly implement an on-demand draft whenever that is deemed “necessary”.

Viewed from the USA, what’s most striking about the new German law is how much it resembles the Selective Service registration scheme in effect in the USA since 1980. The new German law also draws on some of the proposals considered by the U.S. National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2017-2020 for (1) advance collection of additional information about potential draftees’ skills and fitness for military assignments and (2) increased use of the Selective Service registration process as a marketing opportunity to promote voluntary enlistment in the military.

The new German law appears likely to backfire on the government in the same ways that draft registration has in the USA: (1) making potential draftees and older allies more aware of the government’s commitment to the legitimacy of military conscription and desire to be prepared to activate a draft whenever it so chooses; (2) catalyzing anti-draft organizing and draft resistance, and (3) providing potential draftees with the opportunity, through the relatively low-risk tactic of foot-dragging or ignoring demands for self-enrollment in the conscription registry, to show their unwillingness to be drafted. That was the message sent by the failure of draft registration in the USA. We hope and expect that young Germans and their older allies will send the same message through their response to the new German military conscription law and personal information collection program.

In the USA, voluntary compliance with the legal mandate for self-registration was low from the revival of the program in 1980, and collapsed completely once it became clear that enforcement against passive mass noncooperation was impossible and wouldn’t be attempted.

The biggest mistake of the U.S. government when it reinstated the requirement for young men to register for the draft in 1980 was to take young people’s subservience for granted and not make any plans for enforcement. The brief round of show trials of non-registrants for the draft in the U.S. in the 1980s was a public relations disaster for the government. That was in significant part because it was a hasty and somewhat desperate response to an unanticipated crisis of public confidence in the registration system and contingency plans for a draft prompted by growing public awareness of widespread non-registration.

Germany appears to be making the same naïve mistake today. I can find no evidence of any plan by the German government for enforcement of the registration requirement against the inevitable resistance, both active and passive.

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France Follows Germany with New (Voluntary) Military Conscription Plan

If you want peace, prepare for war. French President Emmanuel Macron appears to be the latest European leader embracing that ancient maxim, launching a new national military service plan Thursday as France seeks to address shortfalls in its armed forces amidst growing concerns over Russia’s geographical ambitions beyond the war in Ukraine.

Macron announced volunteers – not forced conscripts – aged 18 and 19 will start serving next year in a 10-month new military service programme alongside 6.5 billion euros ($7.6 billion) in extra military spending in the next two years, AP reports.

Germany has already announced it hopes to use the same method to boost its enlistments, as Breitbart News reported. Berlin’s plan remains to be approved by parliament.

“A new national service is set to be gradually established, starting from next summer,” Macron said in a speech at the Varces military base, in the French Alps.

Young volunteers will serve in France’s mainland and oversea territories only, not in France’s military operations abroad, Macron said.

The AP report notes France’s military currently comprises around 200,000 active personnel and over 40,000 reservists, making it the second largest in the European Union, just behind Poland. France wants to increase the number of reservists to 100,000 by 2030.

Macron’s announcement follows the French Chief of Defence Staff warning earlier this month that to present a credible deterrence against Russian aggression in Europe, France’s civilians must stand behind the military, be “prepared to accept losing its children” and “prepared to suffer economically.”

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Liberal Actress Angelina Jolie Makes Unannounced Visit to Ukraine, and Watches Her Bodyguard Get Instantly Mobilized for the Front

Did she bail out the bodyguard or was he sent to the front?

When Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie decided to make a unannounced visit to war-torn Ukraine, she didn’t imagine that she would witness first-hand a grave problem in its society: the prospect of immediate – and forceful – mobilization for combat.

Rumors have swirled online that Jolie had been paid $20 million by USAID for her first visit – but no corroboration was ever found.

During her first visit in 2022 to Lvov in western Ukraine, the air raid sirens sounded, making for an interesting photo op for the star.

Her second visit, this time to frontline areas in Kherson, was also no without some drama, as her surprise appearance was nearly spoiled by military recruiters, who grabbed her bodyguard (or driver, or ‘guide’) and questioned him why he had not enlisted for the army.

The Telegraph reported:

“The Hollywood actress ventured to the southern cities of Mykolaiv and Kherson on her latest humanitarian mission to the war-torn country, meeting volunteers and medics forced to live underground to escape attacks from Russian troops.

But the unannounced visit nearly descended into chaos after a member of her entourage, believed to be a driver, drew the attention of military recruiters at a checkpoint a few hours north of their first stop in Mykolaiv.”

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Ukraine’s ‘Busification’ — forced conscription — is tip of the iceberg

“Busification” is a well-understood term in Ukraine and refers to the process in which young men are detained against their will, often involving a violent struggle, and bundled into a vehicle — often a minibus — for onward transit to an army recruitment center.

Until recently, Ukraine’s army recruiters picked easy targets. Yet, on October 26, the British Sun newspaper’s defense editor, Jerome Starkey, wrote a harrowing report about a recent trip to the front line in Ukraine, during which he claimed his Ukrainian colleague was “forcibly press-ganged into his country’s armed services.”

This case was striking for two reasons; first, that the forced mobilization of troops is rarely reported by Western mainstream media outlets. And second, that unlike most forced conscriptions, this event took place following the alleged commandeering of the Western journalists’ vehicle by three armed men, who insisted they drive to a recruitment center.

There, Starkey reported, “I saw at least [a] dozen glum men — mostly in their 40s and 50s — clutching sheafs of papers. They were called in and out of side rooms for rubber-stamp medicals to prove they were fit to fight.”

The process has drawn criticism after high-profile incidents where men have died even before they donned military uniforms. On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited. Ukrainian authorities claim that he fell, but his family is taking legal action. In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne, although the authorities claim he died of natural causes. In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription; the Ukrainian military denies this version of events. In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center.

Look online and you’ll find a trove of thousands of incidents, with most of them filmed this year alone. You can find videos of a recruitment officer chasing a man and shooting at him, a man being choked to death on the street with a recruiter’s knee on his neck. Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will.

If videos of this nature, on this systemic scale, were shared in the United States or the United Kingdom, I believe that members of the public would express serious concerns. Yet the Western media remains largely silent, and I find it difficult to understand why.

In November 2024, Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov claimed that he would put an end to busification. It is true that Ukraine has been taking steps to modernize its army recruitment and make enlistment more appealing to men under the age of 25. Yet, there is little evidence that those efforts are having the desired effect. And after a year, busification only appears to be getting worse, yet remains widely ignored by the Western press.

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Shocking scenes as huge crowds of ultra-Orthodox Israelis protesting against military conscription throw bottles at female reporter before boy, 15, falls to his death during demonstration

A massive rally of ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis protesting against military conscription today turned violent as the crowd threw bottles at a female reporter and a teenage boy fell to his death. 

A packed crowd of an estimated 200,000 people, mostly men, clogged the roads around the Route 1 highway leading into Jerusalem today. 

Photos showed many had climbed atop roofs of buildings, a gas station and onto cranes.  

Video footage showed the agitated crowd stalking a female reporter from Israeli news outlet V1 who was covering the event before chucking glass bottles at her.  

Crowds of men set fire to pieces of tarpaulin as hundreds of police officers cordoned off several roads across the city. 

Demonstrators packed onto the tops of buildings, petrol stations, bridges and balconies above a sea of fellow protesters, some of whom held signs declaring: ‘Better to go to prison than to the army.’

A helicopter flew overhead as people gathered to take part in collective prayers. 

The Israeli ambulance service said a 15-year-old fell to his death and police said they had opened an investigation into the incident.

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NATO state brings back military draft

Croatia’s parliament has voted to reinstate compulsory military service, ending a 17-year hiatus. The Balkan country abolished the draft in 2008, shifting to a fully professional army.

The move comes amid a broader trend among NATO and EU members of reviving conscription and boosting military budgets, citing current geopolitical tensions, particularly the Ukraine conflict.

Under the new law, around 4,000 recruits will be called up each year in five groups for two months of basic training at military facilities across Croatia, state broadcaster HRT reported on Friday. The program – estimated to cost €23.7 million annually – will begin in early 2026. Participants will receive around €1,100 per month, plus travel and leave expenses, and credited work experience.

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Thousands of Orthodox Jews rally in New York to protest change in Israel’s military draft rules

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed the streets and sidewalks for blocks around the Israeli consulate in New York City on Sunday to protest issues including a potential end of an exemption for religious students from compulsory service in Israel’s military.

The protest at the consulate, a block from the United Nations campus in Manhattan, illustrated the complex relationship between Israel and segments of the large population of very religious Jews in New York and its suburbs.

The two influential, and often rival, grand rebbes of the Satmar community both called on adherents to participate in the demonstration. The Central Rabbinical Congress of the U.S.A. and Canada, a consortium of Orthodox Jewish groups, said it helped organize the protest.

It comes after Israel’s Supreme Court last year ordered the government to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men into the military. There had been a longstanding enlistment exemption – dating to the founding of Israel in 1948.

The ultra-Orthodox worry that mandatory enlistment will impact adherents’ ties to their faith. But many Jewish Israelis have argued that an exemption is unfair. Rifts over the issue have deepened since the start of the war in Gaza.

Rabbi Moishe Indig, a Satmar community leader, said he’s not sure organizers expected so many people to show up but he said he felt urgency building around the issue.

He said he was appreciative of the governments in New York and the U.S. “for giving us the freedom and liberty to be able to live free and have our children go to school and study and learn the Torah.”

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Future of Selective Service Goes to House-Senate Conference – Again

Following approval by the House and Senate of different versions of an annual military policy bill, the future of the Selective Service System (SSS) will be decided behind closed doors by a House-Senate conference committee  –  for the sixth time in the last ten years.

When the Federal government shut down most agencies and activities at the start of October 2025, the SSS stayed in operation and continued to register young men for a possible military draft. Maintaining a fiction of readiness to activate military conscription is apparently considered “essential” to enabling planning for war without limits. And even during the “shutdown”, Congress has taken time out of its budget debates to act on legislation to plan and prepare for war. But major proposed changes to Selective Service laws, regulations, and procedures remain undecided.

By the end of this year, we could see the most significant changes in Selective Service law, regulations, and procedures since 1980. Or pending decisions might be postponed, continuing the current decades-old stalemate between massive noncompliance with the registration and address reporting requirements and Congressional reluctance to admit the failure of the program and repeal the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA).

Here’s what’s in the works:

(1) Changes in Selective Service law

A dangerous and unworkable proposal to have the SSS attempt to register all potential draftees “automatically” using other Federal databases was approved by the full House of Representatives as part of this year’s annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This year’s NDAA still has its traditional “Defense” title. But we can’t help wondering whether, if Congress renames the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War”, as President Trump has proposed, next year’s version of this bill will be titled the “War Authorization Act”.

The proposal for “automatic” draft registration in the House version of the NDAA would give the SSS unprecedented authority to obtain and aggregate any information from any other Federal agency or from potential draftees that the SSS believes might help the agency identify or locate potential draftees. Because whether an individual is required to register, under the current interpretation of the MSSA by the SSS, depends on both sex as assigned at birth and immigration and visa status, the SSS would be authorized and required to collect information held by other Federal agencies for other purposes and interrogate young people to try to create a master database of every young adult in the USA including their sex as assigned at birth, their immigration and visa status, and their current address.

Activists for peace and freedom need to sound the alarm now: The power to collect and aggregate personal information from any and all other Federal agencies that would be given to the SSS by the proposal for automatic draft registration would be unprecedented for any Federal agency, and would have unprecedented potential for weaponization and abuse, especially against immigrant and transgender young adults. Members of Congress should care about, and should oppose, this proposal, even if they aren’t worried about a military draft.

The Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already gained access to the SSS registration database. There’s no telling what damage DOGE would do with the additional data the SSS would be authorized and required to compile in order to try to register potential draftees “automatically”.

The House version of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2026 including the provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration was approved by the full House on 10 September 2025 and finally forwarded to the Senate, after clerical corrections, on 30 September 2025, just before the Federal government partially shut down. A bipartisan amendment to replace the provision for “automatic” draft registration with a provision to repeal the MSSA was introduced in the House, but the House Rules Committee chose not to allow a floor vote on this amendment.

No comparable proposal for automatic registration or expansion of SSS data-gathering authority is included in the version of this year’s NDAA approved by the Senate on 10 October 2025. The fate of the House provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration will be decided during closed-door House-Senate conference negotiations on the NDAA, the outcome of which probably won’t be known until much later in the year.

(2) Changes in Selective Service regulations

During the Biden Administration, the SSS conducted its first comprehensive review in decades of the regulations spelling out its contingency plans for a draft, if Congress were to authorize a draft without at the same time making any other changes to the MSSA. The SSS planned to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for its revised regulations in early 2025. But this update to SSS regulations has been held back indefinitely by President Trump’s ongoing freeze on promulgation of new Federal regulations. Little is known concerning the content of the planned revisions to the regulations.

(3) Changes to draft boards

Lists of draft board members and draft board jurisdictions by county released in February and March of 2025 in response to one of my Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that many local and appeal boards lack a quorum and/or lack a member from each county over which they have jurisdiction. As a result, they would lack authority to adjudicate claims for deferment, exemption, or classification and assignment to noncombatant or alternative service as a conscientious objector in the event of a draft.

Within weeks after I reported on the implications of these draft board vacancies for SSS (un)readiness to actually carry out an on-demand draft, the SSS quietly replaced the application for draft board membership on its Web site with a statement that, “The Selective Service System is currently reviewing the structure and operations of the Board Member Program. As part of this reassessment, we are temporarily pausing the acceptance of new volunteer applications.”

No further information has been released concerning the reasons for the “pause” or what the SSS plans to do about draft board vacancies. The mandate for appointment of draft boards and the entitlement of draftees to have claims heard by local boards and to appeal administrative denials to state and national appeal boards remain part of the MSSA and the SSS regulations, so the SSS couldn’t carry out a draft without filling these vacancies. Current board members continue to serve until their terms expire or they resign or die, but the number of boards that lack a quorum and would be unable to function in the event of a draft will grow with attrition as long as no new board members are being appointed.

It’s unclear whether decisions will be made this year on any of these issues or if these proposals will merely be carried over to, or reintroduced, next year. But these issues won’t go away until Congress acts, and Congress won’t act unless and until it feels public pressure, whether from lobbying or from direct action such as continued passive but massive noncompliance with the draft registration law.

There’s growing recognition that current SSS contingency plans for a draft, especially the registration program, are a paper tiger that won’t stand up to even cursory critical scrutiny. Sooner or later, something has to change. The direction of that change depends on what we do now and in the months and perhaps years ahead to organize and resist ongoing planning and preparation for military conscription that makes larger wars and military adventurism more likely.

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